Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Combine Two Technologies

Like putting a clock in an existing product I keep thinking of combining an XML Swing library with JSF. It would be nice to use JSF as a way to provide the abstraction for differing rendering technologies (this was the first thing I thought when I saw JSF). This interview had some interesting bits of information on this:
"One of the unique things about Faces is that it allows you to have separate classes for rendering a UI component. So a simple text box can consist of a UIInput component, which represents the concept of collecting user input, and a Text renderer, which knows how to display a textbox in HTML. You can create separate renderers for different types of clients -- one for HTML, one for SVG, and one for WML, for example...the third-party component market will continue to grow, not just with HTML components (which will be first), but also components and renderers that support other devices and richer clients."

"There's a sample in the current Faces early access release of XUL instead of JSP, but I think more work needs to be done to prove that other display technologies can really be first-class citizens."

"JavaServer Faces is also a good technology for thin client applications that aren't HTML-based. I've mentioned WML, but you could also write a Java applet application, or some other non-browser client that works with JSF. We'll see these types of applications evolve over time.

Personally, I think fat clients are great for some applications, like RSS News Readers. But web applications are great for other things, and JSF is a good way to build those types of applications. "

The latest download includes XUL in the non-JSP examples.

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